The Bird House A Novel

September 2, 1967

10 A.M.

no bath for three days



THE BABY WAS INCONSOLABLE the night before last. That’s a word you just don’t know the meaning of until you have children, is it? I was up with him at 2:00, at 3:15, and again at 4:00. I know he’s teething, although I don’t remember Emma going through this. It seems she always had teeth.

He didn’t want his pacifier; didn’t want a bottle; or teething biscuit, cereal, or cold spoon. I rubbed brandy on his bulging gums, but they stayed as red as a Monopoly house. I turned on the washing machine and set his basket near it, hoping it would lull him. He was momentarily startled into silence, then started to wail again. I felt my hands go into fists. I closed the door to the laundry room and took three steps away. Was the crying easier to take with the door between us? The muffling made it worse, as if I was choking him.

I took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling. I wanted another wife in the house. Polygamy, I wanted polygamy. I wanted someone else to rock him, someone else to tell me it was okay, that every baby does this and every mother feels this. I wanted platitudes and rhymes and clichés. I wanted this, too, shall pass. I wanted, I realized with an ache, a mother. Not my mother, necessarily, with her flawed memory and pampered habits, but a smart one. A patient one. Maybe any mother would do.

I cried on one side of the door while the baby wailed on the other. Our sobs blended together, like a composite character, louder and less happy than either one of us alone. We both wanted our mothers, and neither of us had them.

Finally I blew my nose and opened the door. I picked him up and brought his wailing face as close to mine as my ears could stand; I needed to smell the beauty of his scalp, his skin. Even angry. Even loud. Even screeching, wailing like a lunatic, you are a miracle. What I used to say to Emma. Every child is a miracle, I would repeat over her tantrums. Every one.

It didn’t help. “What do you want?” I cried. “What?”

I knew I couldn’t stop it—I just had to endure it. Wasn’t that what Betsy told me once? When you can’t stop it, just endure it?

I rocked him and walked around the house, up the stairs, into his room. I watched his open mouth in the air. Opening and closing. Rooting for worms, like a baby bird. There was nothing else I could do, nothing left on the list. I unbuttoned my nightgown, and took out my left breast. It hadn’t been used in weeks, and I had no reason to hope it would work. But he latched on and pulled, finding whatever was left of me. It must have been enough, because we fell asleep together that way, he and I, in our chair.

I didn’t wake up until Emma opened the door. The sound of her in the room, her confusion and jealousy in the air, woke me up. I covered myself hastily and put the baby back in his crib.

The next day his tooth broke through. He woke up giggling and gurgling, and when I brought him downstairs, he sat happily in his high chair, banging on the metal tray with a spoon while I filled the percolator with coffee.

The phone rang and I frowned; only bad news came this early in the day. I was right: it was Sarah, the sitter, canceling for the afternoon and evening. She was sick, and I summoned sympathy for a minute or two, asked about her symptoms. But when I hung up the phone, I felt tears in my eyes. It had been a long few days. I needed a bath, fresh air, a drink. I needed an evening with Peter.

“Oh well,” I said to the baby as I opened a jar of Gerber applesauce, “maybe there’s a movie of the week on TV tonight, huh?” And he smiled. “Maybe I’ll grow old and fat and stinky wearing the same nightgown forever,” I said, and he smiled.

A few minutes later Emma came downstairs, and he smiled for her.

“He’s showing off his tooth,” I said.

She smiled at him, and he smiled back, and she giggled.

“We all have teeth now,” she said, and I said, yes, you’re right.

I patted her on the hand and couldn’t help noticing her knuckles felt dry, scratchy. Maybe the bubble baths were drying out her skin again. Betsy had suggested baby oil in the bath instead, but that made it too slippery, and Emma always protested the lack of bubbles.

I set out Emma’s raisin bran and orange juice and she rubbed her eyes and yawned.

“Is Daddy back from his trip?”

“No, honey. Do you want bacon? There’s bacon in the oven and I can make you an egg.”

She ate her cereal; that was my answer. Why did I expect anything more? My memories of my own childhood, I suppose; my mother cheery and me polite in our sunroom overlooking the pond. The calm stirring of sugar in tea, the sighing over the beauty of the day, the napkins always on our laps. The arrival of my father, freshly shaved, and the smell of his lime soap hovering over me as he kissed me on the forehead.

I turned to the sink to wash the bacon pan. When I heard it, at first I thought it was just the water I was running. And then, louder, a gurgling that was different. I spun around. My baby was gasping for air.

I yanked on the metal high chair tray, squeezing it until it popped and clattered to the floor. I pulled him up to my shoulder and hit him sharply on the back. He gagged and tears flew out suddenly, as if his ducts had been clogged and not his throat. I held him up in the air. His face was reversing itself, back into baby pink.

“Don’t scare me like that,” I said. My hands were shaking, and his chin buckled and quivered, as if in response.

I put him back in his high chair. As I turned away something dark caught my eye on the floor: three soggy raisins, plumped up by milk.

“Emma, did you throw these on the—”

I knelt to pick them up, then stopped dead in my tracks. I turned to her; our eyes locked and I knew. I just knew.

“You fed the baby? Emma, I told you, never give him anything, ever!”

“But, Mommy, he has a tooth!”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“He looked like he wanted my breakfast.”

“Emma,” I said evenly, “only mommies and daddies can feed babies. Not sisters. Not ever.”

She ate her cereal silently, her eyes down, like Theo’s.

“Look at me so I know that you heard me!”

Her eyes met mine, but they were as flat and dull as a lake. I picked the raisins off the floor and sat with her while she finished eating, struggling to think of something to say.

“Should we go for a walk later?” I asked, trying to sound upbeat. “After nap time? To the park?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Would you like to plant flowers? We could gather leaves and acorns and stones. We could make a fairy garden.”

“I guess,” she said, and I nodded, then cleared the plates away. Maybe she’d be more enthusiastic later.

At nap time, I pulled a crystal bell off the cabinet in the dining room, tied a ribbon around it, and hung it on the baby’s door. If my daughter had been a cat, I think I would have hung one around her neck.

Downstairs I kicked off my shoes and picked up the front section of the paper, and a few minutes later I was asleep, too. Half an hour later, the doorbell woke me. Sarah? I thought hopefully, but no, it was Aunt Caro, carrying a small tote bag.

“Sorry I didn’t call first. You look a fright.”

“The baby’s teething. I haven’t slept.”

“Well, I’d offer to help you but I’m miserable with babies. It’s a miracle mine lived to adulthood.”

“It’s a miracle any of them do,” I sighed, thinking of the raisins.

“I brought you some things of your mother’s,” she said. “They were in storage.”

“Storage?” I blinked. “Where?”

“A safe-deposit box.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “she and I emptied that when she went into the nursing home. I have her pearls and her high school ri—”

“This is a second box.”

I frowned.

“It was in my name,” she said quietly. “I opened it for her when she started to think Frank was hiding assets.”

I looked in the tote. A navy velvet ring box, a key, and a beige satin bag that looked as if it held lingerie. I lifted the lid of the box.

“An emerald ring?”

“Surely you don’t remember it. Your mother rarely wore it.”

“Why? It’s so beautiful.”

“I don’t know,” she said too quickly, with a wave of her hand. “Too big and gaudy.” She picked at the hem of her skirt.

“It’s not that big,” I said, slipping it on my finger. The mounting curled slightly around each side of the stone, like a gold vine. “The setting reminds me of a sculpture,” I said.

“Well, it’s quite a bit of gold. You could sell it.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Well, it has no real meaning. It’s not as if your father gave it to her.”

I sighed. “That wouldn’t have much meaning, either, I’m afraid.”

I took it off and twirled it to appreciate the setting of the intertwined gold, which was almost, well, floral.

“Who did give it to her?”

“No idea.”

“Huh,” I said, squinting. “Who’s Rose?”

“What?”

“The inscription.”

“What inscription?” She yanked it out of my hand.

“It says, ‘To my rose.’ Did Mom have any friends named Rose?”

“No idea,” she said breezily, handing it back.

I picked up the key: LIPSKI FURRIERS.

“I thought she sold her mink.”

“No. She kept it for you.” She handed me the satin roll. “And this will help pay for the storage fees.”

I unwrapped the roll, expecting more jewelry, but there was a stack of $100 bills, thirty of them. I looked up at my aunt, who shrugged.

“She said it was all she could gather up. After Frank left I told her to put it in the bank but she seemed to think he could still get his hands on anything that wasn’t locked away.”

“That must have been such a nightmare for her.”

“She knew nothing about money. And clearly, neither did your father. I hope you haven’t inherited this propensity.”

I scowled. “He was the man who knew too much, I’d say.”

“Ann,” she said softly, “if you listen to nothing else I’ve ever told you, listen to this: the stock market is not a playpen.”

I blinked. Was Aunt Caro going senile on me, too?

“She owed you money,” I said, handing it back.

“She owed me nothing, Ann. Take it and go on vacation. Or buy a savings bond for your children. I wish I’d remembered socking it away for her; you could have invested it.”

She looked at her watch and asked what time Theo would be home. When I told her he was out of town, she raised her eyebrows and said, “Again?”

“Ann.” She sighed as she headed for the door. “When I was your age, my husband fell in love with his assistant. I caught them kissing one afternoon when I stopped in his office for lunch.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and here’s the kicker—his assistant was a man.”

“Aunt Caro!”

“Yes, that’s where my son gets it, I suppose,” she said, smiling. “But the reason I’m telling you this now is because I want you to know something else.” She picked up her coat and stood at the door. “It all began when he started taking business trips. I don’t think they were business trips at all.”

“I don’t think Theo—”

She held up her hand. “I’m not accusing. I’m just saying to keep your eyes open. Open the mail, look through the drawers. And always hang on to a little bit of your own money.”

After Caro left, the rest of the evening passed without incident—we went to the park and Emma and I played hopscotch. The children ate dinner, Emma drank chocolate milk. We read stories, and after I put them to bed, I considered putting myself to bed. Instead, I picked up the heaping laundry basket and started folding. Socks, dungarees, boxer shorts. Always a million small pieces that needed to be put back together. It takes half an hour, maybe more, just to fold.

Upstairs, when I opened Theo’s sock drawer, the drawer liner curled up on one side. I tried to smooth it down, and it protested.

Theo kept glue in the top drawer of his desk; when I opened the drawer I expected to find glue, and I did. But my aunt’s words come back to me: keep your eyes open. I pulled the drawer out farther but then it stuck. Frowning, I reached my fingers underneath, and felt something familiar. A heavy paper, good for absorbing ink, thoughts, tears. It was rolled into a tight scroll, like a cigar. I pulled it out and took it into my room.

I slid off the old rubber band and unrolled the missing page of my diary.


MAY 17. MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION.


It wasn’t more complicated or mysterious than I have recalled. My entry didn’t offer much more detail than my memory, but there was enough. Enough that Theo wanted to erase it, to cut it out of my heart, to keep me from remembering what I remembered.

MAY 17. MY HIGH SCHOOL REUNION.

I knew he would be there, just as I knew there would be punch and balloons. Who am I kidding? I went to see him, not anyone else. But I expected it to be different. I thought he would live farther away; I thought his wife would be there. And I thought there’d be a moment when he might make me feel young again, when it would all come back. I even imagined, I suppose, that we might kiss. That we might go out for air, walk too far, remember too much. I was right about that anyway. We hadn’t lingered long around the punch bowl before we’d made our way outside. Peter had suggested a walk, but we both knew what was going to happen. And just before it did, he looked at me, his eyes shining with not just love, but tears. They filled his long lashes, making them look like stars.

“You said you’d wait for me, Annie,” he said.

“I have been, Peter. I have.”

I put the page back in my diary, where it belonged, and pressed the book closed.

I woke up early, just before dawn, and went downstairs to get the paper. It was still dark but the sky was trying to open up, and the first fingers of orange light hovered above the houses. A lamp burned softly in Betsy’s kitchen next door. When I stepped outside the dew steamed from the twin squares of grass flanking the slate walk. Down the block I could hear the paperboy’s bike, the rhythmic thwack of each paper hitting steps. I picked up my damp paper. The first hints of bacon and coffee drifted by, and I paused a moment to inhale them. Only when I turned and my cotton gown swirled against my legs did I see it on the corner of the step: a bird house. A steep shingled roof, shutters, a chain at the top where it could be hung. I picked it up and pulled the note out of its tiny door.

“For Robin Redbreast,” it said.





May 20, 2010



Tinsley disappointed me again. It was so unlike her, really. Last year she’d had a lovely backyard party for Ellie’s birthday, with homemade cupcakes and a clown and a bean bag toss. This year, she’d decided on an indoor playground called Playmaze, which had the appeal of an Amish corn maze, I suppose—if it had been made entirely of plastic and rubber and rope and stuck in an airport hangar filled with screaming children who had Pepsi stains on their shirts. My first instinct when I walked in was to cover my ears, but I didn’t want to fear for my overloaded eyes.

A high school—age girl chirped as she peeled off a nametag for me, clicking her pen: “Hi there, can we have your name for the nametag?”

“Mrs. Harris.”

“No first name?”

“My first name is Mrs.,” I replied. The nerve!

“A nickname, maybe? Grammy, Gran—”

Her own nametag said KIKI, so I suppose I couldn’t fault her; it was part of her DNA.

“No,” I said more firmly.

I took the tag from her and affixed it to my felted blazer, and turned to go.

“Oh, ma’am, can I also get your shoes?”

She pointed to a bin full of sneakers.

“Not on your life,” I replied as I brushed past her toward the party room that had Ellie’s name posted outside. I supposed I’d also be expected to don a party hat and blow a paper horn.

I’d known I was in trouble the minute the invitation arrived—the envelope was neon yellow, which never bodes well. I’d hoped for a simple family celebration, perhaps at another restaurant Ellie liked, with a few little girlfriends who would be invited to spend the night and play flashlight tag. Instead, her entire class was invited to this torture chamber, and from the looks of it, they’d all decided to come. Tom said we’d open presents at home, afterward, but it seemed like cheating to attend that part and not the main part—and since Ellie had addressed the invitation, I came. I brought my camera and would attempt to make myself useful.

There were no children inside the party room, but Tom and Tinsley already looked frazzled, setting up plates and juice boxes on two long tables covered with yellow plastic. They didn’t hear me near the door; how could they? You couldn’t hear anything in that environment but children screaming, punctuated by an adult calling out a child’s absurdly trendy name—Sloan! Madison! Ashley! Would someone please tell me what’s wrong with a name like Jane?

Tom’s mouth was moving and I couldn’t hear the words, but something about the set of Tinsley’s jaw made me understand they were arguing.

I stepped in purposefully, closed the door solidly behind me, then cleared my throat.

“Oh hi, Mom,” Tom said, startled.

Tinsley’s back was to me as she fussed with juice-box positioning. I saw one hand wipe her eye before she turned back around.

“Hi,” she said, too brightly.

“Hello,” I replied cautiously. “Is there something I can do to help?”

“No, thanks. The pizza will be here in half an hour and the cake’s already precut. And the staff here will clean up. That’s the beauty of a place like this.”

“Yes, that’s the beauty,” I said, as a body thumped hard against the door outside. I looked through the large window but saw nothing—they bounce, they roll, and they just run off, like deer along the highway.

I pulled juice boxes out of their plastic cages and handed them to Tom. When he finished the tables, Tom and I made small talk while Tinsley picked at her cuticles, something I’d never seen her do before. Then he mentioned his upcoming business trip to New York.

“You know, dear, you should take Tinsley with you. I could watch Ellie overnight.”

I felt Tinsley’s eyes look up from her hands, cautiously.

“Really? Well, it would be two nights, actually, Mom, are you sure you—”

I tried to hide my joy but I doubt I succeeded; I felt my cheeks light up like Rudolf’s nose.

“Of course I could.”

“Oh, that’s too much for your mother, Tom,” Tinsley said, and we both ignored her.

“You could pick her up after school, then, on Thursday and again on Friday?”

“Yes, certainly, no problem. It will be good for you two to get away, don’t you think?”

Tinsley said she needed to check on the kids. Her eyes avoided mine as she passed through the door, and her quiet fury was absorbed in the rumble of the corridor outside. The subject was temporarily dropped.

Five pizzas arrived and Tom paid for them, then cut the slices in half again with a cutter he fished out of a canvas bag. Ellie and her classmates showed up a few minutes later, sliding in on socks, their hair staticky and charged. Ellie hugged me and introduced me to two of her friends, Blair and India, before sitting at the head of one of the tables.

“Where’s Tinsley?” I asked Tom and he shrugged. It was an empty shrug, not a weighted one. No self-pity, no worry, nothing careless or petty packed inside. I helped him pile pizza on plates as children cried out for pepperoni and plain. “I haven’t heard one of you say please,” I said, and they all shouted, “Pleeeaaassseee!”

The pizza was decimated and the table covered with twisted, abandoned crusts by the time Tinsley returned, her hair freshly combed. She was wearing a thick coating of pink lip gloss, the kind your hair sticks to in the wind. Some of the pink gloop had landed on her front tooth, but I didn’t tell her.

Ellie blew out her candles and I found myself wishing, wishing beyond measure, that Tom and Ellie would be okay. It would have been just as easy to include Tinsley in my wish, but I didn’t. As we stood shoulder to shoulder, the three of us cutting cake, plating it, adding forks and doling out napkins, the smallest of assembly lines, I couldn’t help noticing that Tinsley had also dabbed perfume behind her ears. The scent of vanilla and musk was odd in the room, competing with tomato sauce and grape juice.

After the cake was served, the other mothers started to arrive, gently guiding their children out the door, as little sneakers stuck to the floor, squeaking their protest with each step: we. don’t. want. to. go. While I was packing up presents, a man came in quickly, picking up a girl in his arms, holding her sideways in a way that made her squeal, and made me nervous. Tom didn’t roughhouse with Ellie. Theo hadn’t roughhoused with Tom. I didn’t even like the sound of the word, heavy on the tongue. The man flipped his daughter upright again, and I felt Tinsley moving toward the two of them, leaning in with her smile and attention as if they’d performed a trick for an audience of one. Tinsley didn’t touch the man; didn’t speak to him or call his name, but smiled a wide lipsticky smile that he returned. Their smiles stretched too far, reaching toward each other like a tightrope they could walk. I squinted: he had dark hair and he was wearing a sweatshirt, though not a Villanova one. Was that him? I looked at his hands gripping his daughter. Were those the fat fingers that had held Tinsley’s cheek? Or was there, god forbid, more than one? I glanced back at Tom but he was leaning over the cooler, looking for something amid the ice. Tinsley walked them to the door and said good-bye. She didn’t touch him, but her eyes lingered on him, moving from face to neck to forearm. I recognized that look.

I slipped out and followed the man and his daughter to the front desk, where they stopped to get the little girl’s shoes.

“Hi, Zach,” I said breezily.

“Hello,” he replied slowly as he looked up from tying his daughter’s shoes, his face trying to place mine.

I smiled as if we were old friends, then watched from the window as he and his daughter skipped out to their Lexus SUV, where a blond woman sat in the passenger seat, bouncing a baby on her lap.

Later, back at the house, Ellie and I carried in her presents while her parents brought in the cooler and the tote bags. Ellie had handed them to me, saying, “Take this one, Grandma, it’s a light one,” and, “Not that one, it’s too heavy.” If that had come from Tinsley, I’d find it foolish, but from Ellie it was endearing.

Tinsley went into the kitchen and whistled as she opened cupboards, took down dessert plates, started a pot of coffee. As if she’d been bolstered or fortified by seeing Zach at the party. She and Tom shooed away my offer of help, insisted that I go in the living room with Ellie.

My present looked dull in the pile on the dining room table, with its pale blue paper and the white ribbon I’d curled myself. The others were purple, orange, neon green—and from the looks of the bows, professionally wrapped. I remembered making wrapping paper when Tom was young—white paper that we stamped with happy faces and flower-power stickers. He’d cried when it had been used and thrown away, and Theo told him that was why he was an architect, that it was a terrible job to design something impermanent. That was Theo, always speaking adult to adult. It was as if, after our daughter died, he couldn’t stand the thought of anyone being a child.

“Tom,” I said brightly, pulling up a chair, “do you remember when we used to design the wrapping paper?”

He turned from the refrigerator, which was old and hummed so loudly I could hear it through the alcove, covering whatever he and Tinsley were or were not saying.

“No, I can’t say that I do. I wasn’t much of an artist, though.”

“Oh, you were fine.”

“Not like Dad, though.”

I felt the old frisson traveling through me. “Well, it’s an unfair comparison.”

“No kidding. Ellie, your grandfather’s handwriting was nicer than anything I ever drew or painted.”

I smiled; Theo did have exquisite handwriting, baroque, almost. You didn’t see anything like that anymore.

“I’ll show you some more of his letters on Wednesday when you stay over,” I said. “You can read them to me this time.”

“It’s Thursday, Mom,” Tom said.

“Oh, oh, uh, yes, of course. Thursday.”

Tinsley and Tom exchanged a glance and I wanted to scream. Had she never forgotten a date, an appointment? Had she never shown up for her assignations a half hour late?

“Ann, I just assumed you’d stay here with Ellie,” Tinsley said.

“Here?”

“No way! What fun would that be?” Ellie frowned, and I laughed. My feelings precisely!

“We’ll give her the emergency cell phone to carry,” Tom said to Tinsley. “She’ll be fine.”

“Oh, of course she will be,” Tinsley said and smiled. “Of course.”

“Hey, when are we going to open my presents?”

“Hey, right now, kiddo!” Tinsley said. She reached out to ruffle Ellie’s hair, but Ellie ducked under her hand.

The first two she unwrapped were dolls that looked like streetwalkers, with short skirts and boots. She sighed and set them aside—Ellie had never been a doll person. She picked up the next one, mine, and shook it mischievously.

“It’s not a sports car,” I said.

“It’s not a playhouse,” Ellie replied.

“It’s not a puppy,” Tom chimed in, and turned to Tinsley.

“What? Oh, um, it’s not a spatula!” she said brightly.

“Nice try, Tins,” Tom said quietly.

Ellie tore open the paper, then surveyed the white box, which bulged in the middle. She opened the tissue carefully, peeking. Her eyes opened wide. “Is it… a cat?”

“No, silly,” I laughed.

She pulled out the jacket and gasped. “Grandma!” she cried. A short brown fur jacket, with knit ribbing around the waist and a hood. Exactly what a young girl dreams of. The gentleman at the fur salon that specializes in restyling was certainly right.

“Wow,” Tom said.

Ellie was already putting it on. “I had it made a little big, so you could wear it for a while,” I explained.

“It’s perfect!”

“Wow, it’s uh, very grown-up, Ellie,” Tinsley said.

“I love it! I’m never taking it off!”

“That’s not real fur, is it, Ann?” Tinsley frowned, “Because—”

“Oh no, of course not!” I said. And as I leaned over to zip up the zipper for Ellie, our eyes met and I gave her the universal grandmother-to-grandchild signal.

I winked.

She finished up her presents and I told Tom I’d forgotten something in my car. It was in a dark box on the floor of the backseat, no bow. I carried it in and set it in front of him.

“An early present for you,” I said.

“Three months early?” he replied and I shrugged.

The lid of the box came off easily.

“Sneakers?”

“Running shoes,” I said firmly. “I hope they fit.” I smiled as I gathered the scraps of wrapping paper for the recycling bin.

Tinsley looked up from her nails warily, like someone does when a nurse enters the room with a needle.